Renascent - Praise Of The God Almighty

Elisabeth : After almost ten years of silence the quintet Renascent, originally from Finland, found their way back to the studio in 2016 to record their second long player ‘Praise Of The God Almighty’. Since 2017 finally there has also a physical version of this album been made available and I’m again impressed with the time and energy bands invest in a CD that is getting released totally independently. Visually, this one is a direct hit, but I have to say that I expected kind of very brutal, guttural, filthy, smashy death metal at first sight.

Musically, however, we get melodic death metal that is very symphonic due to the keyboards, and the touch of black metal creates an incredibly theatrical character. However, the keyboards sometimes sound just a bit too dominant for my taste. This is certainly not criticism on the skills of keyboard player Mikaela Akrenius, because she knows very well what she is doing, but there is sometimes too much fuzzing about. I can deal pretty well with the newer sound of Dimmu Borgir or other bands that sound like that, but I have the feeling that the very prominent keyboard stands in the way of the power of the rest of the music, since there are pretty awesome guitar solos and riffs and very good drumming on this record. But I would do ‘Renascent’ injustice to compare them with bands like this, since they have a clear Christian influence that can also be recognized in the lyrics and they have created a very unique sound and appearance with it. It is certainly worth a try to listen to ‘Praise Of The God Almighty’ and give it a chance.